Meyer's more militaristic take on the Star Trek universe was vehemently opposed by its creator Gene Roddenberry, as it did not correspond to his vision for the Star Trek universe, but the latter was toothless at the time of Wrath of Khan due to the stipulations in the Star Trek films contract he had with Paramount Pictures. The situation, however, came to a head with The Undiscovered Country when Roddenberry (now back "on staff" as the Executive Producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, though he still had no creative say in the movie) was angered by the racism he perceived in the production in regard to the Klingons. A charged meeting between the two parties followed: "His guys [Roddenberry's legal staff, headed by the in Star Trek-lore reviled Leonard Maizlish] were lined up on one side of the room, and my guys were lined up on the other side of the room, and this was not a meeting in which I felt I'd behaved very well, very diplomatically. I came out of it feeling not very good, and I've not felt good about it ever since. He was not well [an ailing Roddenberry would indeed pass away only a short time later], and maybe there were more tactful ways of dealing with it, because at the end of the day, I was going to go out and make the movie. I didn't have to take him on. Not my finest hour," Meyer later recounted. [1]

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A graduate from the University of Iowa with a degree in theater and filmmaking, Nicholas Meyer, prior to his involvement with the Trek films, was best known for adapting and directing the 1979 time-travel film, Time After Time (starring Malcolm McDowell and David Warner), and for writing the Sherlock Holmes pastiche novels The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and The West End Horror (in 1993, he wrote a third, The Canary Trainer). He also wrote the adapted screenplay for the film version of Solution (for which he earned a 1977 Academy Award nomination), whose cast included Georgia Brown, Joel Grey, Samantha Eggar and Jeremy Kemp.

Though Nicholas Meyer is well known to Star Trek audiences, his most influential work, as far as the general public was concerned, was directing the ABC Cold War television movie The Day After (1983, and on which Michael Westmore served as make-up artist, earning him one of his many Emmy Award nominations), which stunned contemporary audiences for its then graphic display of a nuclear holocaust and its aftermath. According the National Geographic series, The '80s: The Decade That Made Us, nearly 100 million Americans tuned in for its first broadcast on 20 November 1983. The documentary further postulated that the movie was a co-influence on then President Ronald Reagan to embark upon the "Strategic Defense Initiative" (SDI, or popularly known as "Star Wars"). Meyer, who was featured in the documentary, mentioned that the producers had trouble finding a director due to the controversial nature of the production, and that he ended up being hired as the third or fourth choice of the producers. It nevertheless won Meyer two 1984 Emmy Award nominations in two categories and a German Golden Screen Award in 1985. Meyer embarked upon this project directly after The Wrath of Khan.